I interviewed Mark Cuban (Broadcast.com founder, Dallas Mavs owner, HDnet founder, etc.) for this month's Wired Magazine about his recent purchase of Landmark Theatres — and his plans to build a digital entertainment empire in which production, development, and distribution are all housed under one corporate roof.
Q: How is this any different from the studio conglomerates that led to antitrust laws?
A: Digital makes filmmaking cheaper and more accessible, so we see ourselves as a conduit for new, independent voices who'd otherwise never have a shot. You could shoot your film on digital, dump it on a hard drive, edit it on a laptop, send us that file, and 20 minutes later we could show it in a theater or upload it to a satellite. You could say that if we became huge, we'd risk becoming a Microsoft. But if we become huge, we want to become more like a Linux.
